Is My El Paso Home in a MUD or Special Taxing District?

What is a special taxing district?

It is a separate government that taxes your property in addition to the city, the county, the school district, the community college and the hospital district.

They exist because somebody had to pay to put water, sewer and roads into land the city was not going to develop. A district gets created, it issues bonds to build the infrastructure, and the homeowners who move in afterward pay those bonds off through their property tax bill for decades.

Nothing about this is a scam and nothing about it is hidden in a legal sense. The seller is required by Texas law to tell you, which is covered at the bottom of this page. What catches people is that nobody discusses it until closing, and by then the number is already in the payment.

The three kinds you will find in El Paso County

Municipal Utility Districts, or MUDs. The big ones. A MUD levies a rate per $100 of assessed value, exactly like your city or school tax does, and in this county those rates run from about $0.62 to $0.89 per $100. On a $300,000 home, the high end is over $2,600 a year.

Emergency Services Districts, or ESDs. Fire and emergency medical service for unincorporated areas. Much smaller, around $0.09 to $0.10 per $100.

Public Improvement Districts, or PIDs. These work completely differently and the difference matters. A PID is a flat dollar assessment per lot, not a rate per $100. It never shows up in a combined tax rate percentage, which means a 2.5% area with a PID and a 2.5% area without one are not the same cost and no percentage comparison will ever reveal that.

Municipal Utility Districts in El Paso County

Horizon Regional MUD

Tax year 2025 rate: $0.662800 per $100. That is $0.4231 for debt service and $0.2397 for operations.

Covers roughly 90,885 acres, about 142 square miles, north of I-10 and east of Loop 375. It contains all of Horizon City plus a large amount of unincorporated county in the extraterritorial jurisdictions of El Paso and Socorro. Primarily Clint ISD with a portion in Socorro ISD.

And then there are Defined Areas, which most people have never heard of.

Five areas inside the district levy an additional $0.225000 per $100 on top of the base rate. The district's own election order confirms this is additive, not instead of.

Those areas: Hunt Communities, Hunt Properties, Rancho Desierto Bello, Ravenna, and Defined Area No. 6.

A home inside one pays $0.6628 plus $0.2250, which is $0.8878 in MUD tax alone. On a $300,000 home that is about $2,663 a year, on top of everything else.

Paseo del Este MUDs, numbers 1 through 11

These cover the Eastlake and Mission Ridge corridor, all within the City of El Paso's extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning unincorporated. Subdivisions include Mission Ridge, Peyton Estates, Peyton Pass, Painted Desert, Morningside, Hillside Park and Painted Sky.

Which numbered district applies is decided lot by lot, and adjacent subdivisions can be in different ones.

The spread from the cheapest to the most expensive is about 0.18 percentage points on your total rate. On a $300,000 home that is roughly $534 a year, decided by which side of a survey line your lot happens to sit on.

School district for most of this corridor is Socorro ISD, though the Clint ISD boundary is close enough that it has to be verified per address.

Emergency Services Districts

El Paso County ESD No. 1: $0.100000 per $100. Serves Horizon City, Paseo del Este, Sparks, El Paso Hills, Horizon View Estates, Colonia Revolucion, Agua Dulce and Lakeway Estates. This rate is confirmed for tax year 2026 as well.

El Paso County ESD No. 2: $0.087138 per $100. Serves Anthony, Canutillo, Clint, Fabens, Montana Vista, San Elizario, Socorro, Tornillo and Vinton.

These are small relative to a MUD. On a $300,000 home, ESD No. 1 is about $300 a year.

Public Improvement Districts

City of El Paso PID No. 2, the Eastside Sports Complex PID. Covers Tierra del Este III Phase V, inside city limits in 79938.

The assessment is $3,000 per platted lot, payable in full at any time or in installments not exceeding $200 per year for fifteen years, billed along with your annual property tax notice.

We found no PID in the Eastlake corridor.

Why PIDs are easy to miss. A PID assessment is a flat dollar amount, so it does not appear in any combined tax rate percentage anywhere. You can compare two neighborhoods at identical rates and one of them quietly costs $200 more a year for fifteen years.

Where there are no special districts at all

Worth stating plainly, because it is the other half of the answer.

There is no MUD, water district or improvement district anywhere on the West Side of El Paso. We checked the full county list of special districts. Every single one is east, southeast, in Horizon, in the Lower Valley, in Fabens, in Tornillo, or downtown.

The Upper Valley and the Country Club area are served by El Paso Water, which bills you for water and does not tax you for it. Details on what the West Side does cost are in the West Side guide.

One correction worth making, because it circulates: Haciendas del Norte Water Improvement District is not in northwest El Paso. Its address is on Sagebrush Circle in 79938, which is far east county, out toward Montana Vista. The name misleads people.

What a district actually does to your rate

Four areas within a few miles of each other in and around 79928, all tax year 2025:

Add ESD No. 1 and a Horizon Defined Area and the top of that range reaches about 3.45%.

From 1.84% to 3.45% inside a few miles. On a $300,000 home that is the difference between about $460 a month and about $863. Same price, same size, same zip code in several cases.

The full version of this story, including why the line between Horizon City and Eastlake is a survey line rather than a road, is in the Horizon and 79928 guide.

How to check your own address

Use the El Paso County Truth in Taxation lookup at elpaso.countytaxrates.com/tax. Enter the address and it returns every single entity that taxes that exact parcel, with each one's rate. This comes off the tax roll rather than off a map, which makes it the most reliable answer available to a member of the public.

If you see a line that says Horizon Regional MUD or Paseo del Este MUD No. anything, the property is in a district.

Two other useful sources: the El Paso Central Appraisal District property search at epcad.org, and the El Paso Tax Office entity and rate table.

And if you are trying to determine whether an address is inside Horizon City limits specifically, the Town of Horizon City Planning Division can confirm it from the official annexation record. That is the authoritative answer, and the only one.

What the seller is legally required to tell you

Texas does not leave this to chance, and the notice requirements have real teeth.

For a MUD, under Texas Water Code sections 49.452 and 49.4521, the seller must give you written notice before a binding contract is signed, or at closing. If it was not delivered before the contract, the buyer may terminate. The buyer signs to acknowledge receipt, and a separate copy is executed and recorded at closing.

The notice itself has a required format, including a 24-point bold caption reading NOTICE TO PURCHASER OF SPECIAL TAXING OR ASSESSMENT DISTRICT, the district's current tax rate per $100, total bonds payable itemized by purpose, any standby fee, and a statement about city limits or extraterritorial jurisdiction status.

Failure to deliver it lets the buyer recover either all costs of the purchase plus interest and attorney fees, or up to $5,000 plus attorney fees.

For a PID, under Texas Property Code section 5.014, the seller must deliver notice before the contract is effective, stating that the buyer is obligated to pay assessments, that an assessment has been levied and may be paid in full at any time, and that failure to pay can result in penalties, a lien and foreclosure.

This is a summary of how these notices generally work, not legal advice. If a notice was not delivered to you, that is a conversation for your agent, your broker, or an attorney.

What we could not confirm

Published here deliberately, because a reference page that pretends to be complete is worse than one that tells you where the edges are.

Whether ESD No. 1's property tax reaches inside Horizon City corporate limits. Its sales tax language implies the territory does. The property tax boundary was not confirmed.

Whether Paseo del Este parcels are excluded from Horizon Regional MUD. Strongly indicated, since both districts' documents omit each other, never stated outright. Verify per address.

Tax year 2026 rates for the MUDs, Horizon City, Socorro ISD, Clint ISD and the community college. Only the City of El Paso at $0.798000 and the County at $0.451133 had been adopted when this was compiled.

A reported Tierra del Este Phase 3 PID at roughly $662 to $799 per lot. County sources were unreachable.

The boundary of City of El Paso Multiple Municipal District No. 1, which levies an additional $0.270000 per $100 on about 3,643 acres somewhere inside city limits. The boundary is incorporated by reference in the statute rather than published as a map, which is exactly why nobody should publish a flat citywide rate without checking an address.

Rates on this page are tax year 2025 unless noted, compiled in 2026 from the El Paso Tax Office entity table, district bond documents and the districts themselves. Rates are adopted annually and change. District boundaries change. This is not legal or tax advice. Verify any specific address at elpaso.countytaxrates.com/tax before relying on anything here, and take questions about notices or disclosures to your broker or an attorney.

Trying to work out what a specific address actually costs to own? Send us the address and your agent will pull the exact rate and what it means monthly.